Posted on 04/29/2003 6:10:50 PM PDT by mhking
|
|
|
By ERIC FRY
JUNEAU EMPIRE © 2003
Touch anything, just walk past anything in Dick and Peggie Garrison's Highland Avenue home, and it's likely to move if it isn't in motion already.
Dick Garrison, a musician and former businessman and movie sound man, is fascinated by electronics and mechanics.
"He was born that way and will probably die that way," said Peggie, who still retains a lilt in her voice from her native Ireland. "We have push-button drapes and a push-button fireplace."
Stay long enough with the hospitable Garrisons and you'll see little toy cars spinning around a plastic plate on the kitchen table (there's a big magnet built into the table), hear a toy monkey chatter or watch home-made lightning cause unplugged fluorescent bulbs to glow (don't even ask).
"This is an electronic nuthouse," Garrison, 79, said. "Everything is radio-controlled."
Well, not everything. Just ask, and Garrison will pick up his trombone, turn on his music system and play along with the jazz - the floor-to-ceiling speaker reverberating and emanating colored lights.
Garrison, who came to Juneau from Seattle in 1941 with the Army Signal Corps, helped install a faster IBM teletype communication system here and in Adak. At that time, the only contact with the outside world was through teletype - typewriters that receive radio signals.
About 6,000 people lived in Juneau in 1941. Another 25,000 to 30,000 troops were camped in the Mendenhall Valley, then mostly farmland, Garrison said.
Garrison, a music graduate of the University of Washington, played the trombone five nights a week at the USO dance hall, once rehearsing with the little-known Debbie Reynolds and Brenda Lee.
In college, he thought he might make a career out of music. "But boy it's good I didn't, because I would have starved," he said, thinking of the competition. He was, however, one of the original musicians in the Juneau Symphony and played in nightclubs here.
"See these two trombones there?" Garrison said in a recent interview. "I tell people I play in stereo."
Garrison was born a tinkerer. While in Adak in the Aleutians, he cashed in on his talents by fixing several hundred watches from the Third Fleet. It paid for his first house in Juneau, he said.
Garrison has owned a number of businesses here, including a music shop.
As a sideline, "I bought a whole bunch of jukeboxes, and I put them in 11 cathouses," at a time when prostitution was legal in Alaska. "Sometimes they had a customer, and I had to go in the back door."
Garrison also owned a furniture store, bars, apartments and land. He retired at age 44 and hasn't had a problem with boredom. He and Peggie travel on cruise ships, so they can dance in ballroom contests.
Dick and Peggie have been married for 42 years.
"He was a patient, I was a nurse," Peggie said. "And we met and got married and lived happily ever after like a cheap melodrama."
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he served as a sound man for Chuck Keen, a local businessman and filmmaker. Keen and Garrison sometimes hosted in Juneau the stars they worked with, such as Tab Hunter and Cesar Romero. They worked with John Wayne on a documentary about communism.
Garrison said he didn't make money working with Keen, "but I tell everybody I got a million-dollar education and experience I wouldn't trade for all the tea in China."
Garrison has two workshops on the ground floor of his house. One is a small room lined with tools and materials. About 170 boxes are marked with items such as "ballast transformers" and "pressure relief valves." There are drawers of jewelry parts. A thousand clock hands fill a cigar box. Eight tape dispensers are lined up on a metal chest of drawers. Jars are nailed by their lids to the door frame.
"How'd you like to take inventory here? In this place here I can do anything. I never have to go to a hardware store or electric store," he said.
The other work room holds the toy robots, clocks and half-million-volt Tesla coil lightning machine. "Something you very seldom see," he said, perhaps unnecessarily.
Turned on, the machine emits little, crackling lightning bolts, and a nearby row of unplugged fluorescent bulbs lights up.
Walk into one of the garages and mechanical, caged birds sing, colored globes twirl and a red laser light draws ropes on the wall. It's all triggered by a motion detector.
Garrison said he has two patents - for a blinking flashlight and an oyster knife - from which he's never made a nickel.
It's not that the light from the flashlight's bulb blinked - what's the use of that? It was the body of the flashlight that blinked, so you could find it in the dark.
Eric Fry can be reached at efry@juneauempire.com.
In the 4 years I served with the Army in Germany, I supplemented my income by repairing electronic equipment that was destroyed for that very reason.
I earned a very large profit!
Having built several Tesla Coils in my life, I have never had one exhibit what you are saying. Where would the "net power gain" come from? Tesla did not break the laws of physics.
If a Tesla Coil can create a "net power gain," then perpetual motion machines are possible... and they aren't.
HINT, HINT, HINT!
"Ye canna break the laws of physics, the laws of physics, the laws of physics; Ye canna break the laws of physics, the laws of physics, Jim..."
perpetual motion machines can be built - just not designed. If you succeed in building one you're guaranteed to be unable to explain it using the known laws of physics.
Which would suck...
In the event of pulsed power (such as quick capacitor discharges) you can get very high power for very brief periods. But Tesla coils are continuous (AC) operation, not pulsed. So the amount of power you could store would be limited by leakage factors. In the picture shown, the sphere on top looks to be about 12 inches, which can store up to about 500,000 volts before it starts to breakdown the air around it and discharge at a high rate.
Once leakage rate reaches input rate, no more power storage will occur. Since breakdown is pretty "avalanch" in nature it is unlikely that the tesla coil would retain much latent power in its resonant circuit.
Fascinating full-length feature film that finally reveals the secret life of one of the greatest scientific minds that ever lived. Penetrating study of the life and achievements of the genius who dedicated his life to designing technology to serve humankind. The inventor of the alternating current motor, Tesla's discoveries led to the invention of radio and TV, hydroelectricity, remote control, radar & laid the basis for the emerging science of Free Energy. Learn the truth about the father of modern technology. Starring Orson Welles. 105 mins.
One of the reviews:
"THIS PBS HOME VIDEO, ABOUT 90 MINUTES LONG, DOES A WONDERFUL JOB OF CONVEYING THE GENIUS THAT WAS NIKOLA TESLA. THIS IS THE BEST AND MOST WELL BALANCED VIDEO I'VE SEEN ON THE LIFE AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF AMERICA'S PREMIER UNDERRATED SCIENTIST/INVENTOR. WATCH THIS TAPE AND THEN LOOK AROUND THE HOUSE. YOU'LL BE AMAZED IN THE WAYS IN WHICH TESLA TOUCHS OUR EVERYDAY LIVES. IT'S ABOUT TIME HE RECEIVES THE OVERDUE RECOGNITION HE DESERVES. NOT TO BE MISSED."
One other aspect that should not be forgotten in Tesla Coils is that they are VERY HIGH FREQUENCY AC... Definitely not in the 60hz category.
My point was that the power still has to come from somewhere, it ain't being created in the coil. You can get some interesting resonances... but you still only get out what you put in.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.